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Rewriting Proust

Authors Elyane Dezon-Jones, Charles Dantzig and Daniel Levin Becker talk with Alexander Aciman about the imposing Proustian edifice and what it means to rework such canonical writing. In doing so they pose the question: in literature, how far can we go with the classics?

This panel is part of the "Year with Proust" festival organized by the French Cultural Services, which began with an exhibit at the Morgan Library and will culminate in a live reading, 7 nights in 7 locations all over NYC. More information on frenchculture.org.

Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in 20 Tweets. He is a graduate of The University of Chicago, and has written for The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Tablet, and is currently a reporter at Time Magazine.

Daniel Levin Becker is a graduate of Yale University, a Fulbright scholar and the second American member of the OuLiPo. His book, Many Subtle Channels, is an exploration and love song to Potential LIterature. He is the editor of the Reviews section of The Believer and has translated the works of authors such as Théophile Gauthier, Hervé LeTellier and Georges Perec, who performed a series of oulipian manipulations on the first sentence of Swann's Way.

Charles Dantzig is a poet, essayist, translator and author of numerous novels. He read Proust for the first time during his first year of Law school and received his doctorate in law from the Université de Toulouse. He is the author and editor of Le Grand livre de Proust, in which he and other authors deconstruct aspects of the Recherche and of Proust's life in twenty-one thematic sections. Dantzig received the Grand Prix Jean Giono in 2010 for his work.

Emerita professor of French literature at Washington University in Saint Louis, Elyane Dezon-Jones received her Phd from the Université de Paris IV Sorbonne. She is the author - among other works - of Proust et l'Amérique and Marie de Gournay : fragments d'un discours féminin. She has edited the works of Marcel Proust and Marguerite Yourcenar, and published a series of novels, including Meurtre chez Tante Léonie, under the pen name Estelle Monbrun. She is currently working on a graphic novel, Le Fantôme du petit Marcel, illustrated by Stephane Heuet.

Air France is a proud sponsor of 2013: A Year with Proust, a year long festival organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.